The present invention relates to databases, and more particularly to automatic database management. In certain aspects, the present invention provides a self-managing database system architecture.
In today's around-the-clock economy, an efficient and reliable IT infrastructure is paramount for the success of an enterprise. As businesses increasingly rely on such an infrastructure to service customers and partners, and disseminate information among employees, computer systems are no longer peripheral to the management of core business. Even a temporary outage of a critical application may jeopardize the viability of the entire business. Revenue and customers may be lost, penalties could be owed and, the resulting unfavorable publicity can have a disastrous affect on customer confidence and corporate stock valuation. The effective management of the enterprise IT infrastructure is therefore key to the success of modern enterprises.
Recognizing this need, companies today are investing significant amounts of financial and administrative resources to ensure the best possible management of their IT infrastructure. However, organizations today are forced to deal with more data than ever, with customers and employees requiring 24 hour access to this data, from more places, via more type of devices. As IT vendors deliver increasingly sophisticated solutions to meet such exacting demands, the task of systems management has never been more complex. Hiring highly skilled administrative staff to manage such complicated environments is an expensive proposition. This coupled with frequent shortage of experienced administrative personnel often results in spiraling management costs.
While adjusting to new technologies and business practices presents numerous technical challenges, businesses today are also faced with increased competition as the Internet has collapsed the world into a small global village. An online bookseller in Seattle faces as much competition from other booksellers in the US as it does from one in China. In order to maintain business profitability amidst ever-growing competitive pressure, corporations must minimize their operating expenses with system administration costs being no exception. This creates an interesting corporate challenge. Enterprises must manage their systems and data much more effectively than ever—to ensure the highest performance, scalability and availability—but at a cost significantly lower than before.
In prior database systems, proper on-going management and tuning of the database are done with a lot of manual intervention by database administrators (DBAs) and with help from external tools. Much raw data is pulled out of the database to perform this external management, and much of this information pulled out of the database is redundant. In addition, management of one component of the database is usually done in isolation from another. Previous Database management techniques result in sub-optimal database performance, stability and availability and require highly-skilled DBAs.
Ongoing database administration tasks, such as performance tuning, space management, system resource tuning and backup & recovery, account for the biggest chunk of a database administrator's time. According to a survey conducted by Oracle, DBAs typically spend about 55% of their time performing these activities.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide systems and methods that make the database as self-managing as possible so that operation of the database requires minimal manual administration. Such a database system should be self-aware, self-tuning, self-learning and substantially self-managing.